Parliamentary democracy was introduced in 1951 but was twice suspended by Nepalese monarchs, in 19. The country was never colonised but served as a buffer state between Imperial China and British India.
The Shah dynasty established the Kingdom of Nepal and later formed an alliance with the British Empire, under its Rana dynasty of premiers. By the 18th century, the Gorkha Kingdom achieved the unification of Nepal. The cosmopolitan region developed distinct traditional art and architecture. The Himalayan branch of the ancient Silk Road was dominated by the valley's traders. The centrally located Kathmandu Valley is intertwined with the culture of Indo-Aryans, and was the seat of the prosperous Newar confederacy known as Nepal Mandala. Parts of northern Nepal were intertwined with the culture of Tibet. In the middle of the first millennium BC, Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, was born in Lumbini in southern Nepal. The name "Nepal" is first recorded in texts from the Vedic period of the Indian subcontinent, the era in ancient Nepal when Hinduism was founded, the predominant religion of the country. Nepal is a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious and multi-cultural state, with Nepali as the official language. Kathmandu is the nation's capital and the largest city. Nepal has a diverse geography, including fertile plains, subalpine forested hills, and eight of the world's ten tallest mountains, including Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China to the north, and India to the south, east, and west, while it is narrowly separated from Bangladesh by the Siliguri Corridor, and from Bhutan by the Indian state of Sikkim.
It is mainly situated in the Himalayas, but also includes parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Nepal, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked country in South Asia.